Surrealism Quotes - Page 3

• Let my enemies devour each other.

  Salvador Dali

  Artist, Enemy

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• Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.

  Octavio Paz

  Real, Criticism, Analysis

  Octavio Paz (1973). “Alternating Current”, p.31, Arcade Publishing

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• I know the new comedy god is surrealism, but it doesn't touch my heart.

  Jenny Eclair

  Heart, Comedy, Knows

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• When people use the term magic realism, usually they only mean 'magic' and they don't hear 'realism', whereas the way in which magic realism actually works is for the magic to be rooted in the real. It's both things. It's not just a fairytale moment. It's the surrealism that arises out of the real.

  Salman Rushdie

  Real, Mean, People

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• Three men riding on a bicycle which has only one wheel, I guess that's surrealism.

  Dong Kingman

  Men, Riding, Three

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• I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I'm never served a cooked telephone.

  Salvador Dali

  Lobster, Telephones, Restaurants

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• As far as the style, I was fascinated by surrealism.

  Mark Mothersbaugh

  Style, Fascinated

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• Even as a teenager we got interested in the Beats, Dada, and Surrealism, and so on. What drew us to those was that their lives were their art. It wasn't something they did separately. Reading biographies of artists of that kind was what was fascinating to me, more than the stuff they made. We became convinced that life and art is really the same thing.

  Genesis P-Orridge

  Art, Teenager, Reading

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• In the past things were either in your head (subjective, imaginary, fantasy) or else they were part of the outside world - cold, hard, concrete materialistic reality. If you want to look at it in terms of poetry, there was surrealism and objectivism. Now there's the veil of the virtual in between. The old opposition between inner and outer doesn't quite capture it, especially as it contains elements of both. It's real but not concrete.

  Elaine Equi

  Real, Past, Looks

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• If surrealism ever comes to adopt a particular line of moral conduct, it has only to accept the discipline that Picasso has accepted and will continue to accept.

  Andre Breton

  Discipline, Lines, Moral

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• Nothing proves the truth of surrealism so much as photography. The Zeiss lens has unexpected faculties of surprise!

  Salvador Dali

  Photography, Lenses, Unexpected

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• I was interested in the ways that artists responded to totalitarianism - the Czech Jazz Section, Romanian absurdist theatre, Brecht's alienation effect. The anything-goes, anarchic qualities of jazz and Surrealism seemed to offer a way to cross some of the forbidden frontiers of Eastern Europe.

  Nicholas Royle

  Artist, Europe, Theatre

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception... as film is able to do today... And while efforts have been made to present paintings to the masses in galleries and salons, this mode of reception gives the masses no means of organizing and regulating their response. Thus, the same public which reacts progressively to a slapstick comedy inevitably displays a backward attitude toward Surrealism.

  Walter Benjamin

  Attitude, Mean, Giving

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• Words that in their everyday surrealism have no parallel in contemporary writing... Music that mines the deep veins of fatalism in the Appalachian voice

  Greil Marcus

  Writing, Voice, Everyday

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• An aesthetic movement with a revolutionary dynamism and no popular appeal should proceed quite otherwise than by public scandal, publicity stunt, noisy expulsion and excommunication.

  Cyril Connolly

  Scandal, Publicity, Movement

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• Seine et Danube was launched in 2003 with the help of Romanian authorities who had finally realized the necessity of promoting literature and Romanian culture in general. Along with focusing on the literature of the countries the Danube traversed (with an emphasis on Romania), we printed work that interested us from the banks of the Seine: French and French-Romanian authors like Cioran and Fondane. We dedicated our last edition to surrealism and Esthetic Onirisme.

  Dumitru Tepeneag

  Country, Culture, Literature

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Our Onirisme movement was a synthesis between the Romantic Fantastique and Surrealism. Dimov and I rejected automatic writing. We loved surrealist painters: Chirico, Magritte, Tanguy and especially Brauner (also a Romanian), who never respected the laws that Breton imposed in his manifests.

  Dumitru Tepeneag

  Writing, Law, Movement

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I've always enjoyed feeling a connection to the avant-garde, such as Dada and surrealism and pop art. The only thing the artist can do is be honest with themselves and make the art they want to make. That's what I've always done.

  Jeff Koons

  Art, Feelings, Connections

  "60 SECONDS: Jeff Koons". Interview with Graeme Green, metro.co.uk. July 18, 2017.

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• The reason that I like SF and fantasy and horror is that to me it's the pulp wing of surrealism. That's the aesthetic of undermining and creative alienation that I really go for.

  China Mieville

  Wings, Creative, Fantasy

  "The Road to Perdido". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. February 2003.

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• The overintellectualization of surrealism can be a bromide. A dream interpreted is a deflated dream.

  Graham Joyce

  Dream, Surreal

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• The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot.

  Graham Joyce

  Fashion, Mtv, Games

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• I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naivety has no peer but my own.

  Andre Breton

  People, Secret, Insane

  "First Manifesto of Surrealism". Book by Andre Breton, 1924.

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• My idea is to bring happiness, respect, vision, poetry, surrealism and magic [to design].

  Philippe Starck

  Ideas, Design, Vision

  "Design and Technology for the Next Generation: A Collection of Provocative Pieces, Written by Experts in Their Field to Stimulate Reflection and Curriculum Innovation". Book edited by David Barlex, November 15, 2007.

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• Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Latin, Reality, America

  "The Yellow Trolley Car in Barcelona, and Other Visions" by William Kennedy, www.theatlantic.com. January 1973.

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• It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself.

  Andre Breton

  Mirrors, Black, Firsts

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